3 Skills That Are Essential For Influencing Others

Doesn’t really matter who you are. Father, entrepreneur, corporate worker, college student, preacher, teacher, soldier, police officer, salesman, YouTube personality, Twitter personality, blogger, author, politician, lawyer, and every one else on this earth uses influence in their day to day lives. In traditional education there were certain skills that were hammered on that get skipped by now. Many of these skills are fundamental for becoming a influential and well adjusted person. Things like rhetoric, logic, grammar, and the like. To learn these fundamental skills we must take it upon ourselves to practice them day in and day out getting better and better at them.

The man who makes use of the three skills that I’m going to talk about below is going to go far in life. As people able to use influence is essentially the most important skill that one can learn today. Especially since we’re entering into an economoy where everyone wil have to be (for a lack of a better word) their own “brand”. A long time ago to make it in this world you’d have to have hunting, survival, and combat skills in todays world these are largely replaced by having influence skills. Doesn’t mean those other skills are useless of course just that the focus has shifted in our information economy. Learning the following skills are essential and should be practiced everyday from a young age (along with other critical skills) for a man to go furthest in this world and accomplish what he wishes.

Influence Skill #1 – Writing

The written word has tremendous power as they say “The pen is mightier than the sword”. Learning how to communicate effectively through the written word will greatly expand your influence as well as the respect that others have for you. It’s unfortunate (for the massess) but they consider someone who has mastery of the influence skills to be special and a step above them. Just think about how the average person views you after you have written a book. And this applies in the days when most writing took place with a pen and paper and was for a limited audience the importance this skill has been magnified exponentially with the release of technologies such as blogs and self-publishing.

Writing takes a long time to master and truly be effective at (as does any important skill). The sooner you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard the sooner you’ll be writing stuff that everyone wants to read. You may say “I’m no  writer, I wouldn’t even know what to write” first off anyone can be a good writer given enough time and effort. Second it doesn’t matter at first just write. You can use a journal which has many different benefits, you could pick out a writing prompt every day and use that or could simply write down take aways from what you’ve been reading (you are reading aren’t you?). Point is get started writing, right away.

Influence Skill #2 – Speaking

“I’m an introvert” no you’re just an excuse maker. Everyone needs to learn public speaking especially those who have adopted the limited belief that they’re “introverted”. Speaking is another skill that has always been incredibly important. Think about it when you can convince and persuade with the spoken word (our most common form of communication, other than body language) you have great power and influence. And this is all made eponential with the advent of things like YouTube and Periscope. Now one can be become a celbrity of sorts making lots of money simply from recording themselves doing different things and giving different presentations.

Speaking also opens you up to all sorts of opportunities that others will pass by on. Most people are deathly afraid of speaking and instead of facing their fears and overcoming them they instead hide behind labels or other rationalizations. Start by simply finding a topic and speaking about it to yourself in the shower or in the car. Just go free flow. Then record yourself either with a microphone or with a video camera and then listen to it. Finally put together outlined speeches and record yourself presenting them so you can address body language issues and the like. Speaking will put you head and shoulders above the average person when it comes to influence do not neglect this critical skill.

Influence Skill #3 – The Money Skills

The money skills refer to a set of skills that are the most important for acquiring money. They are sales, marketing, and copywriting. And they matter more than anything else for how much money you’re going to take home regardless of what your business is. Not only that but they dive into the most important thing that you can learn about to gain influence and power in this world and that thing is human nature. All sales, copywriting, and marketing is, is leveraging human nature to acquire money from it. Nothing more and nothing less. Sales, copywriting, and marketing should be taught from a very early age.

As with all of these skills mastery takes time and these skills are too important to leave to chance. You must submerge yourself in learning them and make them a part of who you are. Same holds true with writing and speaking. Whether it’s for making your own brand and becoming an entrepreneur or clawing your way up the corporate ladder all of these skills are required and will make accomplish your goals that much easier.

Learn The Skills…Or Suffer

What I mean by this is that we’re moving into a time when being able to influence others and have your own platform will be critical for employment and making a living. When robots replace the menial and lower tier jobs and HR and government influence makes corporate jobs like diving into a snake pit hoping not to get bit, you’ll need these skills to survive. Practice now, get the crappy first runs out of the way so you can shine when it really counts. Your first writings will suck, as will your first speaking attempts, as will your first ham fisted attempts at copywriting, sales, and marketing. This is all fine and part of the process.

The point is to get these failures out of the way as early as possible. That way when it comes time rely on these skills (and that time will be earlier and earlier as we continue on the track we’re on) you’ll be able to shine and not suffer. So learn these now and reap the rewards down the road or ignore them and suffer when you need them most. The choice is yours and change is coming, so prepare accordingly.

If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it.

-Charles Sledge